AI Reading for Friday December 26

Chip-wrecked by the great memory stick-up: how OpenAI cornered the RAM market and drove up the price of everything electronic - Moore's Law Is Dead

GP-tea and no sympathy: Similarweb data show that over the past 12 months Google Gemini's traffic share rose from 5.4% to 18.2% while OpenAI's ChatGPT fell from 87.2% to 68.0%, a 19-point drop driven by Gemini's big improvements, Google branding, distribution. - Benzinga

Appetite for data center debt appears satiated, as overstuffed investors push yields materially higher. Applied Digital paid spreads roughly 375 basis points higher than similarly-rated companies (about a 70% increase), impairing the economics of the AI buildout. - The New York Times

it’s all good, Fed Chairman Kevin Hassett will drop rates 200bp

HGP Intelligent Energy asked DOE for a loan guarantee to repurpose two retired U.S. Navy reactors at Oak Ridge to supply 450–520 MW to an AI data center, estimating $1.8–2.1 billion total and $1M–$4M per MW retrofit. - Tom's Hardware

Inside Groq's LPU: keeping the tensor cores fed with high energy efficiency, low time to first token - Hacker Noon

Dutch litho king ASML prints extreme chips, and extreme money, with extreme UV. Headquartered in Eindhoven, makes essential EUV lithography machines costing as much as €340 million each, reported €2.1 billion profit in Q3 2025 with about 43,000 employees, and faces over 30% China exposure and geopolitical risks. - Le Monde.fr

An AI boom added about $500 billion to US tech billionaires' net worth in 2025, with Elon Musk remaining the richest and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang rising in the rankings as chipmakers and AI platforms drove the gains. - Financial Times

In 2025, the AI sector produced more than 50 new billionaires as investors deployed over $200 billion into AI startups—about 50% of global funding, up from 34% in 2024, Crunchbase reported. - Forbes

AI jnicorn factory: More than 50 people became AI billionaires in 2025, primarily founders of enterprise AI firms, including Bret Taylor, Clay Bavor, Lucy Guo and Mercor founders Brendan Foody, Adarsh Hiremath and Surya Midha. - Gizmodo

ChatGPT, how do I get rich quick?

Ding-dong, privacy is dead: Amazon began rolling out Familiar Faces across the U.S., allowing users to label up to 50 faces (unnamed faces auto-removed after 30 days) with the feature disabled by default, prompting privacy warnings from the Electronic Frontier Foundation. - Fox News

Fact-check yourself before you wreck yourself: Research provides evidence that fact-checking significantly reduces engagement with posts on Facebook rated as false and also decreases users' subsequent activity. - CEPR

Fowl play: How City AM editor Steve Dinneen exposed an AI-generated pitch, "London's Fried Chicken Wars," traced to Nairobi-based Wilson Kaharua. - City AM

Is AI taking humanity back to the dark ages? Joseph de Weck warns widespread AI use—surveys show 82% used AI in the past six months, OpenAI finds 73% of prompts are non-work, and an MIT EEG study shows reduced cognitive activity—risks eroding critical thinking and individual autonomy. - Business Insider

Lidar of the pack: Waymo has an enormous lead in the hard work of executing and scaling robotaxi operations, while Tesla far outpaces Waymo in pie-in-the-sky puffery. - Gizmodo

Tesla has about 30 Robotaxis in Austin (only recently without safety drivers) while Waymo operates roughly 200 in Austin and over 2,500 vehicles with 14 million paid rides this year, prompting experts to cite Tesla's camera-only approach and operational hurdles. - The New York Times

Waymo pauses service in San Francisco as floods threaten - CNBC

When you park in a loading zone but summon your Tesla just before it gets towed. - Business Insider

I, Robot, or eyeroll-bot: Companies that develop humanoid robots acknowledge that public expectations for the machines are higher than their current capabilities. - The Wall Street Journal

A how-to guide on how to use AI to plan and organize goals and schedules for 2026. - Fast Company

After a year interviewing over 50 tech leaders, four themes emerged: adopt AI or be outcompeted; AI is already practical across roles; soft skills and governance and safety grow in importance; and AGI timeline estimates vary widely. - Business Insider

Shane Legg, Chief AGI Scientist and co-founder of Google DeepMind, warned AI could replace many remote, internet-based cognitive jobs within the next decade, predicting professional-level capabilities and potential team reductions such as 100 engineers to 20. - Mashable India

Worst game of 2025: 'PromptQuest' in modern chatbots. Microsoft Copilot's inconsistent outputs and hidden model changes — exemplified by incorrect file types and false completion reports — undermine productivity and raise training and integration costs. - The Register

Scant evidence we will make 100 years of scientific progress in 10 years with AI, despite major investment and attention. - The New York Times

Experts say society should develop reliable tests to detect machine consciousness to inform policy, safety measures, and ethical treatment. - The Wall Street Journal

Comparing leading AI coding tools—GitHub Copilot, Google Gemini Code Assist, Replit, JetBrains AI, OpenAI Codex/ChatGPT, Anthropic Claude, Cursor, Windsurf, Mistral Vibe and Google Antigravity. - Hacker Noon

Comparing Claude Code and Codex … Claude gives you more process knobs to tweak - Build

Asking Claude to research alternatives - claude.ai

Claude Code is a no-brainer but on $20 plan you run out of tokens after 2h sessions and have to wait for it to reset, can switch to Codex in meantime but might have to pay the $100 if I am on a project where I need it. I love Windsurf+Claude Code, but not totally sure if I can recommend Windsurf long-term post-acquisition, everyone uses Cursor.

Andrej Karpathy's 'vibe-coding' brings coding to everyone, with pitfalls. Generative-AI tools from OpenAI, Anthropic and Google spurred billion-dollar startups and weekly time savings of five to eight hours, but Stanford research found reduced code quality and increased editing. - The Globe and Mail

Colin Kaepernick is piloting his AI storytelling platform, Lumi Story AI, in partnership with Prince George's County (Md.) public schools to encourage more students to use AI. - The Washington Post

AI could improve education and improve (or worsen) inequality. Startups aim to scale tutoring, currently benefiting few, but there are also big gaps in access to tech and ability to leverage it. - ZDNET

dang, Corona AI went hard - Reddit

Record low major crimes in NYC by various measures. - The official website of the City of New York

the eye sees what it brings the power to see, people gonna believe what they wanna believe, has not 100% to do with reality.

I grew up in NYC in the 70s and 80s. If we had had the Citizen app and NextDoor and social media back then we would never have gone out of doors. Now I can walk through Bed-Stuy and feel safe and people are, OMG the crime rate is through the roof. Amusing and perplexing.

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